•‘Religion, Media and Cultural Studies’. Martin Marty Center’s Religion and Culture Web Forum, May 2009. (A pre-publication version of a chapter to appear in Theory/Critique/Religion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches. Richard King (ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Forthcoming, 2010.)
•‘Afterword’. Entertainment Media in Indonesia. Edited with Mark Hobart. New York and London: Routledge. 2008. (Reprinted from Asian Journal of Communication. 16/4 [2006]: 432-8; Afterword.pdf).
•‘Visions of Terror: On the Use of Images in Mass-Mediated Representations of the 2002 Bali Bombings’. (Visions of Terror.pdf) In Media and Political Violence. Annabelle Sreberny et al. (eds.) Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Pp. 211-45. 2007.
•‘Substantial Transmissions: A Presuppositional Analysis of “The Old Javanese Text” as an Object of Knowledge, and Its Implications for the Study of Religion in Bali’. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. 159/1 (2003): 65-107.
In the text of conspiracy thriller "Embassy," an online novel by Richard Doetsch, the character is described as "a starkly thin fellow with a protruding Adam's apple." My brain goes: Alan Rickman!
But when I click on the chapter's accompanying video, the man is younger, tanner, scruffier. He's dressed like he should be bumming clove cigarettes at a concert, not spying on the Greek Embassy.
What I'm reading is a Vook -- a video/book hybrid produced in part by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books. Interspersed throughout the text are videos and links that supplement the narrative. In one chapter, the Greek ambassador receives a mysterious DVD, and readers must click on an embedded video to learn what's on it. In another, kidnapper Jack ominously tells his hostage that he's going to prove that he means business.
"How are you going to do that?" Kate asks.
"Are you squeamish?" Jack replies.
Below that dialogue, a little box encourages readers to "SEE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT" by clicking the play button.
(What happened next, in a comically foreboding scene: Jack grabbed Kate's hand and threatened to chop off her fingers with a kitchen knife.)
It's a dizzying experience, reading Vooks. But they represent just a few examples of a new genre that has been alternatively dubbed v-books, digi-books, multimedia books and Cydecks, all with essentially the same concept: It's a book . . . but wait, there's more!
There will certainly be more of them. The first six books of text/Web hybrid "The 39 Clues" have nearly 5 million copies in print, and nearly 700,000 registered users for the site. A seventh book will be released in February. "The Amanda Project," released this fall, is set to be an eight-book series. Brad Inman, founder of Vook, said that his company will release as many as 200 titles next year -- a goal made more feasible by the relative cheapness of producing his online-only books. "It's very inexpensive in scale. We're talking thousands of dollars, not even tens of thousands of dollars" for each project.
Is a hybrid book our future? Maybe. "As discourse moves from printed pages to network screens, the dominant mode will be things that are multi-modal and multilayered," says Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. "The age of pure linear content is going to pass with the rise of digital network content."
Predicting the eventual death of the traditional novel sounds practically heretical. But keep in mind that the genre has actually existed in English for only about 300 years, and that experimentation and evolution have always been a part of the way we tell stories.
Perhaps the folly isn't in speculating that the book might change, but in assuming that it won't.
Choose your adventure
The bells and whistles in hybrid books are endless. In "The Sherlock Holmes Experience" -- one of six books, including "Embassy," published by Vook since the company launched in October -- two classic Arthur Conan Doyle stories are annotated with video clips of historians sharing Holmesian trivia. Hyperlinks pepper the text, sending readers to Wikipedia pages explaining old-fashioned terms.
In "The Amanda Project," a young-adult series launched earlier this fall, three teens investigate the disappearance of a mutual friend, primarily in a book but also on a companion Web site, where readers are encouraged to upload their own "clues" to Amanda's presence. Some contributions will be incorporated into the second book, due out in February.
In "Skeleton Creek," another work for tweens, the narrative alternates between the written diary of Ryan, a housebound teen trying to investigate strange occurrences in his home town, and the video missives of his best friend, Sarah. Ryan -- and the reader -- access Sarah's transmissions by logging onto a Web site with various passwords, provided at the end of each chapter.
Myebook, which helps users self-publish books online, is flexible with the definition of "book," allowing text to be mashed up with video and applications.
These hybrid books "truly [are] groundbreaking, and I don't use that word lightly," says David Levithan, a Scholastic editor who worked on "Skeleton Creek" as well as "The 39 Clues," a series involving an elaborate online game. "It's expanding the notion of what storytelling can be."
If readers visit every hyperlink, watch every video and play every game, it is possible for the experience of consuming a single book to become limitless -- a literal neverending story. It's also possible for the user to never read more than a few chapters in sequence, before excitedly scampering over to the next activity.
Hybrid books might be the perfect accessory for modern life. They allow immediate shortcuts to information. They feel like instant gratification and guided, packaged experiences. What they don't feel like, at least in certain examples, is reading.
Envision, for a moment, what it feels like to delve into your favorite book. Picture losing yourself in the fictional world for hours on end -- the way the characters sound in your mind, the way unfamiliar references give you pause. What is a nosegay, anyway?
If you could see the authoritative version of a character right away, without waiting for the movie version, would you?
If a floral dictionary were just a click away, would you interrupt your reading to visit it?
Would these abilities represent a breakthrough, the sort of enhanced involvement that book lovers have always dreamed of? Or would they tamper with our imaginations, completely changing the experience of reading?
Can you imagine?
It's not coincidence that many current hybrid books are aimed at kids -- the first generation of "digital natives" who, we're repeatedly told, feel stark naked without a cellphone, iPhone and a couple of laptops strapped to their persons.
"What they really love is staying in that world," says Lisa Holton of Fourth Story Media, which packaged "The Amanda Project." The non-text components "give them a way to dive even further. When you hang out with kids and you watch what they're doing, we as adults can't even begin to understand their relationships with technology." Holton left a job in traditional publishing to found Fourth Story and explore new forms of storytelling.
But what happens to the traditional reading experience, the one involving a fat novel, a fireplace and a cup of tea?
"It's very common for [a 15-year-old] to read, but have her phone there and her computer there," says Patrick Carman, who wrote "Skeleton Creek" and one volume of "The 39 Clues." "For her, having this multimedia experience is like sitting down with a cup of tea."
He directs me to his niece, an exceedingly generationally aware 14-year-old named Madison Wilcox. "The books with the videos, I think they keep our interest better," Madison says. "The generation we're in is always using technology. [Books like 'Skeleton Creek'] are easy to blend in with our lifestyles."
Inman of Vook says it would be a mistake to compare products like his with traditional texts, the two genres being independent entities.
"We don't pretend that it's a book because it's not." With the Vook, "there's an expectation that you're not gulping the text," as you would in a traditional novel. Instead, Inman says, "you're tasting the text," dipping in and out of it at will.
One wonders how this tasting affects the way we read -- that shortening of attention span we've read so much about.
"When you go from one task to another, your brain does slow down," says Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT. "Your brain has to reconfigure its cognitive network. For the first few seconds [of the new activity] there's an increase in errors," in how well we comprehend what we're reading or viewing.
"The way the brain handles language is very different than the way it handles pictures," says Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who studies multitasking. "One of the ways is pacing. You read a book and you stop whenever you'd like. When you watch a video, you can't do that. It goes on." It's active entertainment vs. passive.
Retention and comprehension are moot points when the narrative in question is, for example, "Embassy." Missing a paragraph or two won't affect a reader's understanding of the plot; missing a plot point or two isn't a life-or-death scenario.
In reading "Embassy," what concerned me wasn't that my brain was getting overworked but that my imagination wasn't.
The pleasure of reading has always been its uniquely transporting experience: the way a literary world might look completely different to two readers. One might picture the fictional heroine as a Natalie Portman type; the other might see her as Freida Pinto.
But when the "true" representation -- like clove cigarette guy -- is immediately provided to the reader, imaginary worlds could be squelched before they have a chance to be born. Reading Vooks made me feel a little like a creative slacker. Maybe there was no point in imagining what someone or something looked like, if I was going to be helped along anyway.
David Sousa is a consultant in educational neuroscience and author of "How the Brain Learns to Read." In his classroom research, he says, "we find that kids are not able to do imagining and imaging as exercises" as well as they once did, "because video's doing the work for them. . . . They still have the mental apparatus for that, the problem is they're not getting the exercise."
Reading has traditionally been one of imagination's personal trainers, and while skipping from medium to medium might provide other benefits (catering to a variety of learning styles rather than just the visual reader's), it might adversely affect the way we create our own worlds.
Of course, some hybrid books' companion activities seem designed to exercise creativity. Readers of "The Amanda Project," for example, are encouraged to contribute to the site's catalogue of reader-submitted stories in a sort of organized fan fiction compendium. Madison, the 14-year-old, says that though she's never been what you would call a bookworm, the multimedia aspects of her uncle's books have made her more willing to read other things.
And Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that whatever assumptions we might make now about hybrid books, there's a good chance they won't hold true when the medium grows up. "Things like the Vook are trivial. We're going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We're at the very beginning stages" of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future. "The very, very beginning."
By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 28, 2009; C01
Are you better off, as a media consumer, than you were 10 years ago?
Having lived through the Awful Aughts -- which began with news organizations vowing to get serious after 9/11 and ended with Jon and Kate, Octomom and Balloon Boy -- do you feel better served by the news establishment?
The easy answer, of course, is you must be kidding. Shriveling news operations seem increasingly seduced by the sensational, at least when they're not boring people with inside political baseball.
But tilt the picture just a bit. On Jan. 1, 2000, there was no Huffington Post or Daily Kos or National Review Online or Politico or Facebook or Twitter. There were a relative handful of bloggers -- I joined their ranks that summer -- but nothing like the tens of millions who permeate cyberspace today. If you had a BlackBerry, it was a two-way pager. The iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs's eye. The only mass medium for downloading music was six-month-old Napster. The fledgling Google was covered mainly by tech writers.
Fox News was the third-place cable network in prime time, averaging 248,000 viewers. Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather drew nearly 30 million viewers. In short, while the Internet had delusions of grandeur -- AOL was 10 days away from swallowing Time Warner in that ill-conceived marriage -- the old gatekeepers still reigned.
There are many reasons why the 2000s have been hard on the dinosaur media, but I, for one, would not want to return to the days before instantaneous search, smartphones, online video, Wikipedia and the rowdy, raucous arena known as the blogosphere. This eruption has drawn the masses into the maelstrom, enabling them to do what the pros do, sometimes faster and better.
But first let's examine what Time, in one of a spate of similar pieces, calls the "Decade from Hell." The media scorecard wasn't all bad. Chronicling the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks helped reassure and comfort a shaken nation. Newspapers exposed George W. Bush's domestic surveillance program and secret CIA prisons abroad and the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. The aggressive approach to Hurricane Katrina revealed negligence and ineptitude on a stunning scale. And war correspondents have shown incredible bravery, in some cases paying with their limbs or lives.
* * *
But the two biggest disasters of early-21st-century coverage remain a permanent stain on journalism. The failure to challenge the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq -- and an accompanying tendency to dismiss antiwar voices -- is now regretted by the news organizations themselves. And having served mainly as cheerleaders for the tech bubble that popped in 2000, the press fell way short on the housing and lending bubble that nearly sank our economy in 2008. I know a few financial journalists sounded warnings, but, collectively, the media did far too little to spotlight a shadow banking system built on preposterously exotic risks and federal regulators who blithely looked the other way.
It was complicated and dull, yes -- much like the year-long effort at health-care reform that finally passed the Senate on Christmas Eve. I would credit the media with a valiant attempt to explain and examine this legislative morass, even to the point of declaring that the high-decibel charges about death panels were bogus. But polls showed that many Americans believed the kill-Grandma theme nonetheless, just as a stubborn minority persists in believing that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite the media's dismissal of such nonsense.
If news organizations have lost much of the public's trust, some have themselves to blame. Over the past decade, the breathtaking fabrications of Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today revealed dysfunctional newsrooms that missed the flashing red lights. Rather's reliance on suspect documents in challenging Bush's National Guard service, which cost Rather the CBS anchor chair, was a huge setback as well. That story was driven in part by conservative bloggers, just as the scandal over Alberto Gonzales politicizing the selection of U.S. attorneys was galvanized by the liberal site Talking Points Memo.
Partisanship is unabashed on the Web, and increasingly on cable, as is evident from the prime-time parade of Republican lawmakers and commentators on Fox and Democratic lawmakers and pundits on MSNBC. This has fueled the fragmentation of a business that can benefit by reinforcing what its followers already believe. At the same time, the media mainstream played a central role in fostering sky-high expectations for Obama, which, inevitably, crashed into the messy reality of governing.
The rise of niche journalism is taking place as old-line organizations more frequently chase tabloid melodramas. Cable television and morning shows breathlessly pursue narratives involving missing white women, a runaway bride, a mom with octuplets, a beauty queen who opposes gay marriage. Reality television manufactures faux stars -- remember the media mobs over Paris Hilton's brief jail term? -- who wind up on real newscasts. It is a mind-set that breathes life into celebrity deaths -- such as the two-week frenzy over Michael Jackson's -- and gorges on misbehavior by the likes of David Letterman and Tiger Woods. (Imagine if all the reporters chasing Woods's many mistresses had been assigned to study whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.)
* * *
As fate would have it, all this has coincided with the collapse of the business model that sustained mainstream outfits for generations. The digital revolution has killed off several newspapers and sent those in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore into bankruptcy; the Washington Times, which is cutting nearly half its staff, has just ended its weekend print run. Plummeting revenue has killed off numerous magazines -- Portfolio, Gourmet and Vibe among the latest victims. And when Comcast struck a deal to buy NBC Universal, the television network itself was treated like scrap metal.
If the declining health of the traditional media is the barometer, the '00s have been an unmitigated bummer. But the past decade has also brought such digital delights as Twitter, where I learn new things every day. Those posting there provide links to stories that eluded my radar, striking observations about the news, zingers in ongoing debates, and perhaps a funny line or two. Many of those I follow are journalists and pundits, but some are regular folks who have dived into the rolling conversation, no credentials necessary.
Sometimes I think back to the cumbersome business of information-gathering when you actually had to call people rather than pinging them by e-mail. I can remember searching for ancient newspaper articles on microfilm; going to the Justice Department to pore over lobbying records; visiting C-SPAN to watch videotapes of campaign commercials from far-flung local races. Now huge storehouses of knowledge are available with a couple of mouse clicks.
What a head-snapping contrast: a low moment for old-fashioned journalism and a soaring moment for instantaneous information. Now those of us in the news racket have to figure out ways to exploit and organize this treasure trove while somehow getting people to pay for what we produce rather than Googling it for free. That's a big mountain to climb, and if we have another decade like the last one, we may be permanently stranded in Death Valley.
Kurtz also works for CNN and hosts its weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, already an economic, political and military power, is quietly pushing into a new domain: the media.
By March, the Revolutionary Guards plan to launch Atlas, a news agency modeled on services such as the Associated Press and the British Broadcasting Corp., according to semiofficial Iranian news sites. The move comes as the Guards are increasing control over the conservative Fars News Agency, which has become the mouthpiece of the Iranian regime. Fars denies that it is linked to the Guards.
On Thursday, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of the Basij, a Revolutionary Guard volunteer task force, announced what he called a new era of "super media power" cooperation between the media and the Revolutionary Guards, according to official Iranian news outlets.
Analysts say the Guards aim to control the official account of events coming out of Iran and offer a counternarrative to reports published by independent and reformist media outlets.
The Guards "want to dominate the flow of information and be the ones telling the world what's going on in Iran," says Omid Memarian, a dissident journalist who now lives in the U.S. and who did his military service with the Guards.
Last week, the government awarded Fars first place for best news agency at Iran's annual media fair. At the same time, it has shut down reformist newspapers and Web sites. On Monday, business newspaper Sarmayeh, which has been critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic policies, was shut down. The official IRNA news agency said the daily was closed because its content strayed from business topics.
The Revolutionary Guards, created shortly after the 1979 revolution, have increased their influence since 2005 during the administration of President Ahmadinejad, himself a former member. The government's current slate of cabinet ministers, provincial governors, ambassadors and lawmakers draws heavily from former members or commanders of the Guards.
In October, a business unit of the Guards bought 51% of the shares of Iran's Telecommunications Co. from the government for about $8 billion, effectively gaining control of the country's telephone landlines, all Internet providers and two mobile-phone companies. (The government directly owns the rest of the company.)
The Guards control Iran's strategic long-range missiles and have business holdings in sectors from oil and gas to construction, shipping and telecommunications. When unrest erupted across Iran after the disputed re-election of Mr. Ahmadinejad in June, the Guards were responsible for a crackdown to restore security.
In September, two Fars News Agency photographers, Javad Moghimi, 24 years old, and Hossein Salmanzadeh, 34, fled to Turkey and requested asylum. Their account of the Guards' presence at Fars offers insight into the force's media connections.
The two men say they left Iran after receiving a warning from Fars News' managing editor, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, following pictures they took of opposition protests. Both men say they were taking pictures anonymously and selling them to foreign agencies abroad.
"We were insiders defying orders to not cover opposition gatherings. They considered what we did treason," says Mr. Moghimi, whose picture of a demonstration in Tehran made the cover of Time magazine in June.
Experts say Fars News content closely mirrors the tone and language of the Revolutionary Guard weekly magazine, Sobh-e-Sadegh. The agency's top editors and editorial board are all former Guard commanders. Fars is housed in a building owned by the Guards in central Tehran that was previously the headquarters of the force's intelligence unit.
Fars News Agency's head of public relations, who gave his name as Mr. Salehi, denied when reached by phone in Tehran that the agency was affiliated with the government or the Revolutionary Guards, but declined to elaborate.
Mr. Moghimi and Mr. Salmanzadeh joined Fars when it was created, about seven years ago. The Guard presence has become more visible during Mr. Ahmadinejad's administration, says Mr. Salmanzadeh, who was the agency's deputy photo editor. Many editors were removed, including top management, and Guard members with no journalism experience took their positions, Mr. Salmanzadeh and other people familiar with the situation say.
The new management put editorial restrictions on the staff, the two photographers say. Reporters had to write favorable pieces about the government, and photographers had to angle their camera lenses to show bigger crowds during pro-government rallies, they say. Staff were banned from covering Christmas because it promoted Christianity, and couldn't take pictures of Turkish whirling dervishes because they promote mystical Islam, the photographers and others say, and pictures of women were allowed only if the women were properly veiled.
Journalists from Fars News took part in interrogating dissidents, according to several dissidents who say there were journalists present jotting notes in a corner during the dissidents' interrogations in 2007.
This past spring, in the months leading up to the June presidential election, Fars created a "journalism center," Tavana Club, to train young, hard-line Basij volunteers, according to Iranian media. In July, as protests against the June election results intensified, Fars fired 39 independent reporters from its staff for not being in line with the organization's new policies, and replaced them with the newly trained hard-liners, according to Iranian media reports.
Fars declined to comment on the dismissals. The Fars Web site added an icon to its home page titled "the Velvet Revolution," with daily updates explaining how the opposition was funded and orchestrated by Western countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.
Mr. Moghimi and Mr. Salmanzadeh left Iran separately in early September, without saying goodbye to their families, after the warning from Fars News' managing editor.
The two men now live as refugees in a tiny apartment in a small town in central Turkey with little furniture and no heat. They have applied for asylum at the Ankara offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
"The Revolutionary Guard now understands that political power is interconnected to media power, and they want to control public opinion," says Ali Alfoneh, a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who has studied the Guards extensively.
It's not Twitter or Facebook that's reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let's hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all.
"The television," science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury lamented in 1953, is "that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little." Bradbury wasn't alone in his angst: Television has been as reviled as it has been welcomed since the first broadcasts began in 1928. Critics of television, from disgusted defenders of the politically correct to outraged conservative culture warriors, blame it for poor health, ignorance, and moral decline, among other assorted ills. Some go further: According to a recent fatwa in India, television is "nearly impossible to use … without a sin." Last year, a top Saudi cleric declared it permissible to kill the executives of television stations for spreading sedition and immorality.
So will the rapid, planetwide proliferation of television sets and digital and satellite channels, to corners of the world where the Internet is yet unheard of, be the cause of global decay such critics fear? Hardly. A world of couch potatoes in front of digital sets will have its downsides -- fewer bowling clubs, more Wii bowling. It may or may not be a world of greater obesity, depending on whom you ask. But it could also be a world more equal for women, healthier, better governed, more united in response to global tragedy, and more likely to vote for local versions of American Idol than shoot at people.
Indeed, television, that 1920s technology so many of us take for granted, is still coming to tens of millions with a transformative power -- for the good -- that the world is only now coming to understand. The potential scope of this transformation is enormous: By 2007, there was more than one television set for every four people on the planet, and 1.1 billion households had one. Another 150 million-plus households will be tuned in by 2013.
In our collective enthusiasm for whiz-bang new social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, the implications of this next television age -- from lower birthrates among poor women to decreased corruption to higher school enrollment rates -- have largely gone overlooked despite their much more sweeping impact. And it's not earnest educational programming that's reshaping the world on all those TV sets. The programs that so many dismiss as junk -- from song-and-dance shows to Desperate Housewives -- are being eagerly consumed by poor people everywhere who are just now getting access to television for the first time. That's a powerful force for spreading glitz and drama -- but also social change.
Television, it turns out, is the kudzu of consumer durables. It spreads across communities with incredible speed. Just look at the story of expanding TV access in the rural areas of one poor country, Indonesia: Within two years of village electrification, average television ownership rates reached 30 percent. Within seven years, 60 percent of households had TVs -- this in areas where average surveyed incomes were about $2 a day. Fewer than 5 percent of these same households owned refrigerators. Television is so beloved that in the vast swaths of the world where there is still no electricity network, people hook up their TVs to batteries -- indeed, in a number of poor countries, such as Peru, more homes have televisions than electricity.
Soaps, soaps, and more soaps. But not all of the dramas are created equal.
As a result, the television is fast approaching global ubiquity. About half of Indian households have a television, up from less than a third in 2001; the figure for Brazil is more than four-fifths. (In comparison, just 7 percent of Indians use the Internet, and about one-third of Brazilians do.) In places like Europe and North America, 90-plus percent of households have a TV. Even in countries as poor as Vietnam and Algeria, rates are above 80 percent. But the potential for real growth in access (and impact) is in the least-developed countries, like Nigeria and Bangladesh, where penetration rates are still well below 30 percent.
If an explosion of access is the first global television revolution, then an explosion of choice will be the second. By 2013, half of the world's televisions will be receiving digital signals, which means access to many more channels. Digital broadcast builds on considerably expanded viewing options delivered through cable or satellite. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of households in India with a TV already have a cable or satellite connection. And in the United States, a bellwether for global television trends, the spread of cable since 1970 has meant an increasing number of broadcast channels are sharing a declining proportion of the audience -- down from 80 percent to 40 percent over the last 35 years. The average American household now has access to 119 channels, and a similar phenomenon is spreading rapidly around the globe.
The explosion of choice is loosening the grip of bureaucrats the world over, who in many countries have either run or controlled programming directly, or heavily regulated the few stations available. A 97-country survey carried out a few years ago found that an average of 60 percent of the top five television stations in each country were owned by the state, with 32 percent in the hands of small family groupings. Programming in developing countries in particular has often been slanted toward decidedly practical topics -- rural TV in China, for example, frequently covers the latest advances in pig breeding. And coverage of politics has often strayed from the balanced. Think Hugo Chávez, who refused to renew the license of RCTV, Venezuela's most popular TV network, after it broadcast commentary critical of his government. He regularly appears on the state channel in his own TV show Aló Presidente -- episodes of which last anywhere from six to a record 96 hours.
But increasingly, the days when presidential speechmaking and pig breeding were must-see TV are behind us. As choices in what to watch expand, people will have access both to a wider range of voices and to a growing number of channels keen to give the audience what it really wants. And what it wants seems to be pretty much the same everywhere -- sports, reality shows, and, yes, soap operas. Some 715 million people worldwide watched the finals of the 2006 soccer World Cup, for example. More than a third of Afghanistan's population tunes into that country's version of American Idol -- Afghan Star. The biggest television series ever worldwide is Baywatch, an everyday tale of lifesaving folk based on and around the beaches of Santa Monica, Calif. The show has been broadcast in 142 countries, and at its peak it had an audience estimated north of 1 billion. (Today, the world's most popular TV show is the medical drama House, which according to media consulting firm Eurodata TV Worldwide was watched by 82 million people last year in 66 countries, edging out CSI and Desperate Housewives.)
Ghulam Nabi Azad, India's health and family welfare minister, has even taken to promoting TV as a form of birth control. "In olden days people had no other entertainment but sex, which is why they produced so many children," he mused publicly in July. "Today, TV is the biggest source of entertainment. Hence, it is important that there is electricity in every village so that people watch TV till late in the night. By the time the serials are over, they'll be too tired to have sex and will fall asleep." Azad is certainly right that television helps slow birthrates, though experience from his own country and elsewhere suggests that it is by example, not exhaustion, that TV programs manage such a dramatic effect.
Since the 1970s, Brazil's Rede Globo network has been providing a steady diet of locally produced soaps, some of which are watched by as many as 80 million people. The programs are no more tales of everyday life in Brazil than Desperate Housewives is an accurate representation of a typical U.S. suburb. In a country where divorce was only legalized in 1977, nearly a fifth of the main female characters were divorced (and about a quarter were unfaithful). What's more, 72 percent of the main female characters on the Globo soaps had no kids, and only 7 percent had more than one. In 1970, the average Brazilian woman, in contrast, had given birth nearly six times.
But the soaps clearly resonated with viewers. As the Globo network expanded to new areas in the 1970s and 1980s, according to researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank, parents began naming their kids after soap-opera characters. And women in those parts of the country -- especially poor women -- started having fewer babies. Being in an area covered by the Globo network had the same effect on a woman's fertility as two additional years of education. This wasn't the result of what was shown during commercial breaks -- for most of the time, contraceptive advertising was banned, and there was no government population-control policy at all. The portrayal of plausible female characters with few children, apparently, was an important social cue.
Cable and satellite television may be having an even bigger impact on fertility in rural India. As in Brazil, popular programming there includes soaps that focus on urban life. Many women on these serials work outside the home, run businesses, and control money. In addition, soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV, research by scholars Robert Jensen and Emily Oster has found, has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.
The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls' school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn't just birthrates that changed as Globo's signal spread -- divorce rates went up, too. There may be something to the boast of one of the directors of the company that owns Afghan Star. When a woman reached the final five this year, the director suggested it would "do more for women's rights than all the millions of dollars we have spent on public service announcements for women's rights on TV."
TV's salutary effects extend far beyond reproduction and gender equality. Kids who watch TV out of school, according to a World Bank survey of young people in the shantytowns of Fortaleza in Brazil, are considerably less likely to consume drugs (or, for that matter, get pregnant). TV's power to reduce youth drug use was two times larger than having a comparatively well-educated mother. And though they might not be as subtly persuasive as telenovelas or reality shows, well-designed broadcast campaigns can also make a difference. In Ghana, where as few as 4 percent of mothers were found to wash their hands with soap after defecating and less than 1 percent before feeding their children, reported hand-washing rates shot up in response to a broadcast campaign emphasizing that people eat "more than just rice" if preparers don't wash their hands properly before dinner.
Indeed, TV is its own kind of education -- and rather than clash with schooling, as years of parental nagging would suggest, it can even enhance it. U.S. kids with access to a TV signal in the 1950s, for instance -- think toddlers watching quality educational programming like I Love Lucy -- tended to have higher test scores in 1964, according to research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago. Today, more than 700,000 secondary-school students in remote Mexican villages watch the Telesecundaria program of televised classes. Although students enter the program with below-average test scores in mathematics and language, by graduation they have caught up in math and halved the language-score deficit.
Similarly, evidence that television is responsible for the grim state of civic discourse is mixed, at best. Better television reception in Javanese villages in Indonesia, according to research by Ben Olken, comes with substantially lower levels of participation in social activities and with lower measures of trust in others. Villages with access to an extra TV channel see a decline of about 7 percent in the number of social groups. Similar outcomes have been found in the United States. But improved television reception did not appear to affect the level of discussion in village meetings or levels of corruption in a village road project undertaken during Olken's study. And an examination of the early history of television in the United States by Markus Prior suggests that regions that saw access to more channels in the 1950s and 1960s witnessed increases in political knowledge, interest, and turnout, especially among less-educated TV viewers.
What about television's broader impact on governance? Here, it's the level of competition that seems to matter -- a hopeful sign given that the future of global TV is likely to be considerably more competitive. If the only channel that viewers watch is biased in its coverage, then, unsurprisingly, they are likely to be swayed toward that viewpoint. Brazil's Globo channel, for all its positive impact on fertility rates, has played a less positive role in terms of bias-free reporting. It has long had a close relationship with government, as well as a dominant market share. In Brazil's 1989 election -- a race in which Globo was squarely behind right-leaning presidential candidate Fernando Collor de Mello -- the difference between people who never watched television and those who watched it frequently was a 13 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of voting for Collor, scholar Taylor Boas found. But with channels proliferating nearly everywhere, television controllers may have much less power to sway elections today. In the choice-rich United States, for example, there is no simple relation between hours watched and voting patterns, even if those who watch particular channels are more likely to vote Republican or Democrat.
Then there's corruption. Consider the bribes that Peruvian secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos had to pay to subvert competitive newsmaking during the 1990s. It cost only $300,000 per month for Montesinos to bribe most of the congressmen in Peru's government, and about $250,000 a month to bribe the judges -- a real bargain. But Montesinos had to spend about $3 million a month to subvert six of the seven available television channels to ensure friendly coverage for the government. The good news here is that competition in the electronic Fourth Estate can apparently make it more expensive to run a country corruptly.
Corruption is one thing, but could television help solve a problem we've had since before Sumer and Elam battled it out around Basra in 2700 B.C. -- keeping countries from fighting each other? Maybe.
U.S. researchers who study violence on TV battle viciously themselves over whether it translates into more aggressive behavior in real life. But at least from a broader perspective, television might play a role in stemming the global threat of war. It isn't that TV reporting of death and destruction necessarily reduces support for wars already begun -- that's an argument that has raged over conflicts from Vietnam to the Iraq war. It is more that, by fostering a growing global cosmopolitanism, television might make war less attractive to begin with. Indeed, the idea that communications are central to building cross-cultural goodwill is an old one. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels suggested in the 19th century that railways were vital in rapidly cementing the union of the working class: "that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years," they wrote in The Communist Manifesto. If the Amtraks of the world can have such an impact, surely the Hallmark Channel can do even better.
The fact that Kobe Bryant (born in Philadelphia, plays for the Los Angeles Lakers) sees his basketball shirt considerably outsell those of Yao Ming (born in Shanghai, plays for the Houston Rockets) in China suggests something of that growing global cosmopolitanism at work. The considerable response of global television viewers to images of famine in Ethiopia, or the tsunami in Asia, also shows how TV is a powerful force for shrinking the emotional distance between peoples within and between countries. In the United States, an additional minute of nightly news coverage of the Asian tsunami increased online donation levels to charities involved in relief efforts by 13 percent, according to research from the William Davidson Institute. And analysis of U.S. public opinion indicates that more coverage of a country on evening news shows is related to increased sympathy and support for that country.
Of course, the extent to which television helps foster cosmopolitanism depends on what people are watching. People in the Middle East who only watched Arab news channels were considerably less likely to agree that the September 11 attacks were carried out by Arab terrorists than those exposed to Western media coverage, researchers Gentzkow and Shapiro found, even after taking into account other characteristics likely to shape their views such as education, language, and age. Similarly, the tone and content of coverage of the ground invasion of Iraq was notably different on Al Jazeera than it was on U.S. and British network broadcasts in the spring of 2003 -- and surely this helped sustain notably different attitudes toward the war. But with the growing reach of BBC World News and CNN in the Middle East, and the growing reach of Al Jazeera in the West, there is at least a greater potential to understand how the other side thinks.
Just because soap operas and reality shows can help solve real-world problems doesn't mean the world's politicians should now embrace TV as the ultimate policy prescription. There are of course a few things governments could do to harness television's power for good, such as supporting well-designed public service announcements. But for the most part, politicians ought to be paying less attention to TV, not more. They shouldn't be limiting the number of channels or interfering in the news. A vibrant, competitive television market playing Days of Our Lives or Días de Nuestras Vidas on loop might have a bigger impact even than well-meaning educational programs. And competition is critical to ensuring that television helps inform voters, not just indoctrinate them.
In the not-too-distant future, it is quite possible that the world will be watching 24 billion hours of TV a day -- an average of close to four hours for each person in the world. Some of those hours could surely be better spent -- planting trees, helping old ladies cross the road, or playing cricket, perhaps. But watching TV exposes people to new ideas and different people. With that will come greater opportunity, growing equality, a better understanding of the world, and a new appreciation of the complexities of life for a wannabe Afghan woman pop star. Not bad for a siren Medusa supposedly giving so little.
By Michael Liedtke Associated Press Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Bloomberg is buying BusinessWeek magazine in a deal that brings together a financial news service specializing in rapid-fire updates with a print publication struggling to adapt to the Internet's information whirlwind.
Terms of the sale, announced Tuesday, were not disclosed. Citing unnamed people privy to the negotiations, BusinessWeek pegged the acquisition price at $2 million to $5 million in cash. Bloomberg also would be responsible for paying other costs, such as severance pay to any of the roughly 400 BusinessWeek employees who might be laid off, the magazine's Web site reported.
McGraw-Hill put BusinessWeek on the auction block in July, apparently fed up with the losses that have been mounting at the magazine as its advertising revenue plunged.
The acquisition represents one of Bloomberg's boldest and riskiest attempts to extend its audience beyond its main mode of communication -- the roughly 300,000 electronic terminals that it has set up in the offices of money managers, traders, bankers and other financial services professionals around the world.
Bloomberg did not immediately discuss how it might reshape the magazine's coverage or how its takeover will affect the publication's staff.
It appears that those decisions will be left to Norman Pearlstine, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and Time's former editor in chief. Currently Bloomberg's chief content officer, Pearlstine will become BusinessWeek's chairman.
With a circulation of about 921,000, BusinessWeek has been doing a better job retaining subscribers than keeping advertisers. The total number of advertising pages sold by the magazine has plummeted from a peak of 6,000 in 2000 to fewer than 1,900 last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
This is the second deal announced this month that gives Bloomberg a new springboard to reach a wider audience. It is also joining forces with The Washington Post in a partnership that will put Bloomberg stories in The Post's print edition and Web site and include a jointly operated news service targeting other newspapers.
SHANGHAI — China plans to spend billions of dollars in the next few years to develop media and entertainment companies that it hopes can compete with global giants like the News Corporation and Time Warner, and will in the process loosen some of its tight control of these industries.
An ambitious plan, set forth in guidelines last week by China’s State Council, envisions the creation of entertainment, news and culture companies with a market orientation and with less government backing. China, in short, would like to consolidate its industry into companies resembling Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom, analysts say.
“There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China,” says Jim Laurie, a former ABC News correspondent who teaches at Hong Kong University and recently met with Chinese state broadcasting executives.
Beijing hopes the moves will even improve the nation’s image overseas — part of a longstanding effort to use “soft power,” rather than military might to win friends abroad.
Along the way, Beijing will allow private and foreign companies to invest in everything from music, film and television to theater, dance and opera productions — though largely through state-owned companies.
The News Corporation, Viacom and other Western media giants have for years been frustrated by their inability to win approval to produce films and television programs aimed at Chinese consumers; often, they have operated with Chinese joint venture partners and run into delays or political barriers. Several American companies said they were studying the new Chinese rules and declined to comment further on them.
In its announcement last week, Beijing said that state-owned groups would be reorganized to allow outside financing so that they could “live on their own rather than being attached to government departments as parasites.”
The companies will gain greater freedom to finance and produce a wider range of entertainment and cultural content for distribution inside the country, and even for export.
Though China has not provided a detailed plan yet, one exception is likely to be news programming, which falls under the control of the Communist Party. China has also been upgrading its state-run news media, with an eye on foreign language publications, wire services and television programs to reach readers and viewers overseas.
Among the first companies to benefit from the new government policy will be Shanghai Media Group, one of the country’s biggest state-run news and media conglomerates. In August, the government gave the company approval to reorganize its operations and to issue stock to the public.
S.M.G., as it is known, had close to $1 billion in revenue and $100 million in profit last year. It also has partnerships with companies like the News Corporation, Viacom and CNBC, and a profitable array of television units, including a home shopping network, an animation channel, fashion and lifestyle programming, as well as radio, newspaper, magazine and film production units.
The company is being split into a state-controlled nonprofit side that will house news programming and satellite transmission, and a profit-driven side focused on advertising, content development and distribution.
“The domestic media market is being changed dramatically,” says Li Ruigang, S.M.G.’s 40-year-old chairman and chief executive. “This will be a new S.M.G. In the future we’ll be a holding company, and there will be more than 10 subsidiaries.”
To help the company bulk up, the China Development Bank recently agreed to provide $1.5 billion in financing over the next five years.
The government policy bank will become a partner with S.M.G. on a separate $735 million private equity fund. That fund, China Media Capital, will invest in media and entertainment properties and is headed by Mr. Li, the chairman of S.M.G.
Michael Tung, the chief investment officer of China Media Capital, says the government is encouraging consolidation in the media and entertainment industry and that the fund will help develop bigger media groups.
“China’s market is very fragmented,” Mr. Tung said. “China should have four or five huge media groups. There’s nothing now like News Corp or Time Warner. But we’ll also be looking for overseas opportunities.”
Foreign media companies looking for greater access to China’s vast market may be disappointed, analysts say of the new guidelines.
“This is not an invitation for stakes by international media companies,” says Vivek Couto, director of Media Partners Asia, a Hong Kong-based research firm. “But this may be an invitation for private equity and foreign capital to do more.”
Investments by media companies, if they come, are expected to be through partnerships — something already done with government scrutiny.
“This is a good time for Western companies to come in and find partners,” says Zhu Mei, the head of Linden Consulting in Beijing.
Ms. Zhu says the policy seems likely to nurture partnerships like the joint venture formed by Gehua Cultural Development Group, a state-owned Beijing company, with Live Nation, the American concert and performance organizer.
But other experts warn of regulatory hurdles, because media and entertainment companies report to a variety of agencies, each with its own imperatives.
That may be one reason China Central Television, the nation’s largest broadcaster, was not selected for the first reorganization.
CCTV is considered the mouthpiece of the central government and recently underwent a management shake-up after a fire severely damaged part of its nearly finished $700 million headquarters in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren.
Despite that setback, Mr. Couto and other analysts say some of China’s big media companies are flourishing, with film and other entertainment venues growing quickly as wealthy Chinese consumers seek leisure activities.
One of the country’s most famous film groups, Huayi Brothers Media Corporation, recently won approval to sell stock to the public in an offering that is expected to raise $90 million on China’s new Nasdaq-style exchange, the Growth Enterprises Market.
Over at S.M.G., Mr. Li concedes that taking his company public has long been one of his “obsessions.”
“This is to make the industry more market oriented,” he says. “We hope S.M.G. can be a pioneer of this reform.”
There's no doubt that news in America is in trouble. Of the 60,000 print journalists employed throughout the nation in 2001, at least 10,000 have lost their jobs, and last year alone newspaper circulation dropped by a precipitous 7 percent. Internet, network and cable news employ a dwindling population of reporters, not nearly enough to cover a country of 300 million people, much less keep up with events around the world. It is no longer safe to assume, as the authors of the Constitution did, that free-flowing news and information will always be available to America's voters.
It's time for the public discussion to focus less on what has caused this swiftly escalating crisis--the mass migration of readers to the Internet and the effects of the economic meltdown feature in most explanations--and start talking seriously about solutions. Saving journalism might seem like an entirely new problem, but it's really just another version of one that Americans have solved many times before: how do we keep a vital public institution safe from the ups and downs of the economy? Private philanthropy and government support are the two best answers we have to this question.
One of the best-known examples of philanthropy's response to the news crisis is ProPublica (propublica.org), which was founded in 2007 by editor in chief Paul Steiger with retired banking tycoons Herbert and Marion Sandler. The group, which relies mainly on grants from the Sandlers to stay in operation, maintains a staff of thirty-five reporters and editors, who specialize in hard-hitting investigative journalism with a long memory, the kind that cash-strapped commercial media have always been wary of supporting. With stories on Hurricane Katrina and Guantánamo already published in places like the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Nation [see A.C. Thompson, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," January 5], the group exemplifies how valuable the nonprofit news sector can be.
The group's finances and the scope of its operations, however, are a perfect example of why philanthropy can never be the sole answer to America's news crisis. ProPublica's annual budget of $10 million is exceptional by philanthropic standards, but it is still less than a single newspaper, Denver's Rocky Mountain News, was losing per year before its owners shut it down. An army of ProPublicas is needed before America can replace the capacity for good journalism it has already lost.
That said, the private, not-for-profit news sector is worth paying attention to. Some of the new organizations cropping up might be models for others, if they're successful. Two representative examples are the Investigative Network (currently a for-profit, with plans to become a hybrid not-for-profit and for-profit entity) and the Under-Told Stories Project. Founded to fill a void in coverage of the multibillion-dollar Texas Statehouse budget, the Investigative Network (pressforthepeople.com) aims to use the revenue it gets from selling subscriptions to niche information streams to fund investigative journalism in the general public interest. The group's founder, investigative reporter Paul Adrian, hopes that funding will also come from story syndication and philanthropy. Groups with such a diverse mix of support as part of their initial business plans are likely to become more common.
The Under-Told Stories Project (undertoldstories.org) is devoted to increasing public awareness of underreported international topics. The group is funded partly by sale of its stories, most of which end up on public television and radio, and partly by its institutional partner, Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Organizations that get some support from endowed nonmedia institutions might also become more common.
It's also worth noting that in an environment of diminishing opportunities for young journalists, the Under-Told Stories Project arranges internships. Ensuring that good reporting will be around in the long term is just as important as preserving what we have now, and the private, nonprofit media sector would do well to pursue it more vigorously. (Full disclosure: I am an unpaid adviser to both the Under-Told Stories Project and the Investigative Network.)
Because such fledgling enterprises are potentially so valuable to the health of our media, they should be loudly and publicly encouraged at this stage, even though there will never be enough of them to solve the news crisis on their own. At Harvard's Hauser Center, I've launched a database of nonprofit news efforts (hausercenter.harvard.edu/medialist). Many of the listed organizations are in the early stages of development, and now is the time when publicity and donations can make a decisive difference. If you're looking for somewhere to donate, or if you know of a group that we haven't found yet, I urge you to get in touch. But for a nation in the midst of a crippling news crisis, my list is still alarmingly short, and, as a potential replacement for our commercial media, it can never really be long enough.
I would love it if supporting the news were seen as a routine civic obligation--"this month's city hall coverage adopted by the Elks Club" is easy to imagine--but those days, if they ever come, are likely far in the future, and adopting a stretch of highway is a far cry from building it in the first place.
To survive the current crisis, we need bigger, faster solutions. We need to do what other mature democracies have long done: fully fund our public media with tax dollars. Calling in the resources of the central government to bear on any national problem is sure to be obscured by the fog of ideological and partisan distractions permeating the debates about the climate crisis and healthcare. I can already hear the hysterical, clamoring opposition to "socialized media" or "government takeover of the news."
Better funding for All Things Considered on NPR or NewsHour on PBS will not turn either program into a propaganda outfit for the government. The BBC is not Pravda, and Japan and most of Europe, which have enjoyed extremely well-funded public media for decades, are not a network of totalitarian states. German public television, for example, is amply funded with revenue collected under the aegis of the central government but administered through a decentralized system designed to preserve regional independence. There are numerous democratic nations with public broadcasting systems that are both well funded by their central government and also well shielded from its political influence.
In America, more robust public media won't weaken or constrain our commercial media. No matter how well funded PBS and NPR become, American cable news will still be free to devote 22 percent of its total coverage to stories like the death and burial of Anna Nicole Smith, as it did in February 2007.
Even though it goes against habits of American governance, and even though the Obama administration and its allies are mired in the slow advance of other ambitious projects, now is the moment to advocate greatly expanding our public media. The rapid corrosion of our commercial news demands that something be done soon, and it is still early in the administration of a popular, progressive president, when sweeping changes are possible.
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney have correctly deemed efforts to solve the news crisis a national infrastructure project [see "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," April 6]. We don't leave it up to private nonprofits to maintain our roads and bridges, outfit the Army or provide public transportation. Volunteer militias and private fire departments rightly did not survive the progressive reforms of the nineteenth century. You can still hire a private security firm or travel in a private jet, but the government also assures a basic measure of protection and mobility to every taxpaying citizen. Why shouldn't it be the same for the news and information whose circulation the founding fathers saw fit to protect in the First Amendment?
Total federal support for American public broadcast media in 2007 was about $480 million. That might seem sufficient or even impressive until you compare it with the BBC, which serves a nation with one-fifth the US population but which received the equivalent of $5.6 billion in government money in 2007. When it comes to public media, the United States is decisively outspent by the governments of most other major democracies. Japan, whose population is less than half the size of the United States', spent the equivalent of $6.8 billion for public broadcasting in 2007; Germany, with one-third the size, spent about $11 billion; and Canada, a tenth the size, spent $898 million. Even Denmark and Ireland, with populations smaller than New York City, far outspent the United States per capita, with respective budgets equivalent to $673 million and $296 million.
The amount the government now sets aside for public broadcast media is about what it costs the military to occupy Iraq for two and a half days. Taking into account the hundreds of billions lavished on the interim survival of our elite financial institutions, funding our news infrastructure won't be a hardship. Just a small fraction of the $45 billion--that's billion with a "b"--Citigroup alone has received since October 2008 would give NPR and PBS all the money they need.
Unlike the benefits that come from bailing out investment banks and insurance conglomerates, a stronger investment in public media would give all citizens a concrete and valuable service. Turn on cable TV news to find out about an event overseas, and you are likely to see a panel of well-coiffed pundits sitting in a studio in New York, Washington or Los Angeles debating what might be happening on the other side of the world. Switch to the same story on the BBC, and you are likely to see a correspondent on the ground where the event is actually taking place. The BBC's forty-one permanent foreign bureaus are more than twice the number maintained by ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS each. This isn't a difference of national character; it's simply a matter of money. For commercial TV, paying pundits is a lot cheaper than doing the real work of reporting. And for public media, chronically small budgets often make extensive original reporting too expensive, even for respected shows like NewsHour.
To discern the real view the American people hold toward public media, it is necessary to pay attention to one fact: voluntary viewer donations provide the biggest chunk of the money that keeps public media in business, and have done so for a very long time. The phrase "supported by viewers like you" is more than a marketing bromide. Except for stalwarts like the Ford and MacArthur foundations and Mutual of America, and in years past Exxon and AT&T, foundation and corporate giving has never provided as much to public television as small individual pledges. But despite its reliability, voluntary public subscription is no way to fund a major public service.
Throughout the two decades I was president of WNET, New York's PBS station, I spent a lot of time standing in front of cameras asking viewers for money, so I don't feel ashamed or unqualified to say that even though it has essentially saved the medium and mobilized millions of Americans, the drawn-out, droning pledge drive may finally be reaching a point of diminishing return. After factoring in the salaries of development departments, the costs of direct mail and on-air solicitation, premiums, thank-you letters and the requisite tote bag, a sizable portion of every dollar that comes in to public television is already spent. There is also the less quantifiable cost in viewers who, when faced with a pledge drive, simply change the channel.
For more than fifty years the American people have shown, through their generous donations, that they support the idea and the reality of public media. The government should acknowledge those decades of widespread support by funding NPR and PBS both more extensively and more efficiently.
By increasing direct allocations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is responsible for disbursing funding to public TV and radio affiliates across America, the inherent inefficiencies of fundraising via public appeal would be eliminated, and countless hours of airtime would be liberated from pledge drives. It would also mean that Americans would get more in return for the money they already pay to maintain the public media distribution network, which delivers NPR and PBS to 100 percent of the country.
Perhaps most important, pumping more money into our public media infrastructure could fortify the eroding foundation of print journalism, on which the rest of news media depend. News shows on PBS and NPR already routinely call on newspaper and magazine reporters to provide coverage. Expanding this practice could mean jobs for the rapidly growing number of unemployed print journalists, or even the survival of entire newsrooms in cities with closed or downsizing papers.
Once a newspaper or magazine is lost, its particular blend of institutional history, editorial and reporting expertise, and its ties to the community are never fully recoverable. But an expanded public media network, capable of deploying reporters across the nation and around the world, would at least make sure that someone is always available to gather the news, and keep government and business responsible to the public interest.
The costs of letting our journalistic institutions decay aren't visible like collapsed bridges or tent cities, but they're just as dire. A thriving news media, which America is in real danger of losing, is the unspoken assumption behind not only the First Amendment but the whole idea of self-government. It shouldn't seem radical to expect the same government that recognizes the freedom of the press to also ensure the survival of the press.
About William F. Baker
William F. Baker, president emeritus of WNET, the country's largest PBS station, is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor and Journalist-in-Residence at Fordham University
This article initially characterized The Investigative Network as a private, not-for-profit group. The article has been corrected to reflect the fact that the organization is a for-profit that intends to become a hybrid for-profit and not-for-profit.
Evan Leatherwood, a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York, helped research and write this article.
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